


uncharted ways

by greetingsfrommaars



Series: writing chat prompts [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dreams, Dreamscapes, Gen, Lucid Dreaming, Nightmares, Prompt Fill, Rats, complicated feelings about life and family and motherhood, if I need to add warnings for anything let me know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:34:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22504876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greetingsfrommaars/pseuds/greetingsfrommaars
Summary: The lucidity is not a new feeling.She strides forward with purpose. She can’t distinguish each footstep from the next, but she feels her surroundings sliding on past her at the appropriate pace, the same way the skies revolve slowly to show new stars, whether you look up or not. Once past, they no longer matter anyway. It’s not a choreographed sequence; the individual footfalls can land how they will. It’s a moment in midair before gravity pulls her home, before the dream delivers her to the destination, and she drives it along with every burst of willpower.She sets her path and follows it alone, for she walks uncharted ways, and she belongs to no one.
Series: writing chat prompts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619167
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	uncharted ways

**Author's Note:**

> based on [this art](http://www.opiomgallery.com/en/artistes/oeuvresphotographe/17/jeeyoung-lee)

The lucidity is not a new feeling.

She strides forward with purpose. She can’t distinguish each footstep from the next, but she feels her surroundings sliding on past her at the appropriate pace, the same way the skies revolve slowly to show new stars, whether you look up or not. Once past, they no longer matter anyway. It’s not a choreographed sequence; the individual footfalls can land how they will. It’s a moment in midair before gravity pulls her home, before the dream delivers her to the destination, and she drives it along with every burst of willpower.

She has planned for this, practiced pulling her consciousness through with her when she dreams. It comes in stages of repetition: testing reality inside and outside dreams, to “awaken” herself to the dream state. Pushing on walls and turning them intangible. Rereading the same line of text to watch it morph within a few seconds. All perfectly illogical and unsound.

The house is right where they all said it’d be: a thousand paces from the edge of the windswept field, a hundred paces from the end of the winding road, several purposeful paces from the spreading fig tree. A lifetime away from anywhere she’s walked before.

It’s not like she was counting the steps, but – she recognizes the house on sight. She would know. She’s never been here before, and she could never conceive of it on her own.

The door falls open at a single firm knock. There’s no one there when she passes through, stepping respectfully over the threshold. (She would step on the threshold, just to make a statement, but while there’s still a chance they could have her thrown out, she can’t afford to offend them.)

There’s no one there to welcome her, but she doesn’t need it. She knows the rules. She can handle herself, and there’s no one to fight her on it. She barely even glances over the first room, eyes already set on the door ahead and what may lay behind it.

There’s no one there to send her off, either. No warm arms embrace her. No gentle hands linger on her shoulder, wishing for just a second more. No voices rise in a chorus of well-wishes. No one at all.

She sets her path and follows it alone, for she walks uncharted ways, and she belongs to no one.

🀐

The first room is insultingly easy.

Sallow yellow walls stand all around her. She surveys the room and finds doors ajar at her feet, strewn at angles across the floor, and doors hanging open at irregular intervals up the wall, as far up as she can see. Some look like painted-in windows on hinges; some open into an indistinct green darkness.

Seems like a classic conundrum: which door will lead to happiness? Which will lead to her ruin?

A swirl of crows bursts out of a door underfoot, startling her so badly she trips to the ground. Her arms come up instinctively to cover her face, before she remembers herself, throws them back down. Throws her head back and laughs at herself. She walks uncharted ways, walks them alone, and she lets go at just a sudden burst of birds? She’s better than this.

There’s a key on the ground, across the room. Black. Large. Old-fashioned-looking.

Perfect for a ritualistic challenge.

The birds take flight as one, settling down upon the crooked door frames between her and the key. Their feathers drift to the ground at her feet. She avoids them as she picks her way across the room, even if it feels silly. Surely she can’t catch diseases in a dream. For that matter, surely she can’t encounter harm as a lucid dreamer pushing the dream along. She’d found a blue feather on the ground, once, on the steps behind her school. The edges were soft along her fingers on the way home. Her mother slapped it out of her hand on sight. It’s still the fastest she’s ever seen her mother react to something – besides the blunt ends of her impulsively shorn hair, of course.

Striding along, she can almost imagine the dark feathers on the ground as discarded locks of her own hair. Snip, snip.

The birds pay her no mind as she goes. The air fills with their raucous chatter, like a dining table lined with drunk relatives. She idly wonders if they’re a family, and shuts away the thought immediately. It doesn’t matter. They’re in her way.

The instant her fingers touch the key, the air is filled with a dark, roiling mass of crows. It takes some time to pick her way through it, bringing up her arms to cover her face again, but she manages. She always does. The maelstrom grows in intensity the closer she gets to the door. She trips over several others laying ajar on the way there, almost falls right into one gaping wide open beneath her. She doesn’t even look down at where she almost fell. She knows it’s not the way, and she knows the rules.

She reaches the door, the one the crows had emerged from. It’s barely visible through the storm of thrashing wings, but she had counted the doors she passed while following the wall back.

This is the one.

All at once, she feels the beaks grabbing at her dress, her hair, her fingers as she blindly thrusts the key forward. Eyes squeezed shut, she scrabbles at the door until the key sinks in.

She unlocks the door with a violent twist and falls through.

🌜

The second room, too, she figures out in a heartbeat.

She gets up in a hurry, in case something dive-bombs her again, but she’s alone in the room. She has a moment to take stock of the situation: cool pale cyan walls, the floor covered in a straw-like carpeting that itches at her feet. Pinwheels here and there that get as tall as half her height. Books littered across the ground.

This is cute. She liked pinwheels, when she was younger. Her family would hold massive potlucks in the backyard, and sometimes she’d just sit at a far table with a pinwheel in her hands, blowing and watching it spin over and over again. Pinwheels mean turning your fortune around. Her father could use all the fortune he could get. She could spend hours watching the colors whirl, dinner after dinner, until one fateful afternoon when her cousin bent down and blew it the wrong way. He ran away laughing, leaving her in tears - he ruined it! He turned her luck around! He ruined everything! Her parents turned at the sound of her crying, but turned back once they saw that nothing was broken.

She passes by a rocking horse, painted a smooth black, rocking gently in an unseen breeze. She must be close. Soon, she comes to a tall window, the source of the breeze. The moon hangs overhead, framed by motionless, cotton-spun clouds. To the right, there’s a barely blue grandfather clock, almost blending into the wall. A baby sort of blue is a bizarre choice for a grandfather clock. Her mother would be appalled. There’s a knob on the front panel, but it won’t open.

She turns on her heel. Traces her way back through the room, then follows her cleared path back to the clock, gathering up books in her arms. She leaves the pinwheels alone. Their fortune isn’t hers. They turn slightly in the wind, subject to the whims of the universe like anything else. She walks alone, and she’ll leave the childish indulgences to others.

Coming up to the clock once again, she deposits the books at its side, sits at its feet, cracks open the first volume. The breeze lifts her hair. She doesn’t notice.

She doesn’t rise from that spot for a long time.

The rocking horse swings back and forth. The moon and clouds hang still in the sky. The pages turn one after the other, and she discards the books one by one, but the clock never strikes an hour. Maybe no time has passed, and she’ll teeter on the edge of this moment forever.

She finds it, finally, in a dour book with crisp, unwrinkled pages. She’s moved to the window by then, a haphazard trail of rejected books leading back to the clock behind her. She steps around them, comes back to the clock, lays a hand on the knob. Speaks the words to it, softly, like a secret. The knob turns. She clambers through, sparing a moment’s thought to the mess of books she’s left behind. It’s not like they were much more organized before she came. She can grant herself this little defiance, in the face of everything.

🏁

The third room presents more of a challenge. She tumbles out of a dresser and finds herself awash in checkered patterns, a dizzying field of turquoise and teal. The twisting squares swim in her vision, so that walls and furniture alike warp into an unrecognizable mess. Maybe it’s all in her head, she thinks. Maybe it’s all meant to disorient her, stop her in her tracks. She treads onward.

She trips on a… lollipop? Some kind of checkered stalk coming out of the wall, with a round knob on the end.

She picks herself up, eyes the path ahead. The patterns on the floor twist in unexpected ways, leading to a shallow well, and she won’t know if it’s just a surface pattern or if the floor really caves in there unless she tries it. The colors are pretty, but the design is ridiculously tacky.

Eyes narrowed, she barely keeps herself from walking into a table. By now, she’s established that the room is certainly far from empty, but everything in it is indistinguishable from the walls and the floor. This is more like what she expected: a dizzying room, barely even recognizable as a room, where she can barely tell up from down. Each step makes the checkered whorls contort before her eyes, bending like the mesmerizing patterns when a kaleidoscope turns. She finds another overturned table - or maybe it’s upright, and she’s fallen over? - an improbably large wine glass, more lollipops. The floor seems to rise before her, the corner of a checker-patterned rug jutting out, but she knows better by then. It’s just an illusion.

She trips over the corner of the rug. The distorted curves of the rug cushion her fall. She’s lucky there aren’t any lollipops nearby to take out her eye or something.

She can do this. The first room tested intelligence - recognizing the correct door - and resilience - withstanding the nuisance of the crows. The second was more cerebral, just an extended reading assignment, basically. This room, on the other hand, pushes her to lean over, to rest her head in her hands for a moment, but she won’t. They’ll expect her to take it slow, edge her way through the swells and divots carefully. She won’t be careless, but she of all people will not be slowed down by a few optical illusions. If she can power through work with a raging headache and full congestion, she can power through this.

Eventually, she finds an armchair and considers collapsing into it. But she’s come this far. The dizzying patterns will still be there whether she takes a minute to let them settle or not. The quicker she makes it to the next room, the quicker she can reorient herself. She rests a heavy hand on the chair, to keep her balance, to reassure herself that she remains upright. She’s felt like she was listing gradually to the side for a while now.

Tracing the wall just behind the armchair, she finds an opening, an arched doorway just her size. This’ll be it, she thinks, satisfied. She can barely make out the way forward – it feels like maybe the checkered hallway is just another illusion – but she keeps going. Considers putting up her hands in case she runs into a wall facefirst, but decides to show no hesitation.

She knows the rules, anyway. It’s not like she could turn back on her chosen path once she took that first step.

After some time, the turquoise and teal give way to faded blue and yellow.

🎲

The twisting shapes straighten out to a proper chessboard.

She encounters dice as tall as she is and board game pieces like giant dunce caps, so she plays their game. She comes to a lively multicolored garden, and she draws herself butterfly wings, hovers just out of reach of the snapping Venus flytraps. She wanders into a room of mirrored cubes, suspended in midair; finds her dress turning silver, reflecting back at them, throwing light back and forth ad nauseam. She closes her eyes. She knows who she is, even if the mirrors try to eclipse her with their thousand clones. She finds her way, and she finds another blue room. Stones breaking through the wallpaper, eggs the size of watermelons on the floor. She smashes each one. She weaves through a labyrinth of steaming pipes, each striped a toxic orange and faintly wafting the scent of ozone. She takes a seat, for a moment, in an empty beehive. The honeycombs are warm and dry and minutely irregular in a way she appreciates. It doesn’t matter now, but when she still lived with her parents, she would help her mother plate their dinner and bring it to the table. She would try to place them in the optimal arrangement: symmetrical, rings of similarly sized plates, largest tureen in the center. In the time it took her to be satisfied with one plate, her mother haphazardly piled three to one side, already on her way to the kitchen for the fourth. Her father pointed out that they didn’t have enough plates to finish her pattern, shoved the remaining plates towards the center unceremoniously. Even the adulteration of her masterful design had a certain elegance to it, she would find. The deviation added character. And so when she builds her tower, she sets down the orange cups in slightly crooked ways, within the bounds of structural integrity. Mindful of the marbles strewn across the floor, she builds and climbs steadily, tirelessly onward. She walks uncharted ways, and she stops for no one.

🐜

By the time she arrives, she’s practically skipping along, gleeful with her progress.

She stands in a golden room of golden paper clips. There is no furniture, no apparent exit, just paper clips clinging improbably to the floor and walls, several layers deep, each paper clip slightly shorter than her forearm. A lifetime ago, they would have confused her, the paper clips jutting out as if attached to so many magnets on the wall. She takes it in stride. For all she knows, there really are massive magnets behind every wall.

As it is, she already knows what to do. The nearest clip is warm to the touch; she hooks it onto the next nearest clip, and the next, and the next. She’ll keep going like this, forming a chain out of the paper clips, until she finds some end to it. A repetitive rhythm rises out of the task, easy to fall into: grasp the next clip. Pull on the metal, slip it over the last clip. Grasp the next clip. Pull on the metal, slip it over the last clip. Grasp. Pull, slip. Grasp, pull, slip. Grasp, pull, slip. The regularity is satisfying.

The golden chain drags on the floor behind her.

The difference between this room and those before it is that this room has nothing to occupy her mind. It keeps her hands busy, but in the same repetitive motion, circling around the room. It’s like working a day job, but on a smaller scale. Another type of cycle, like the phases of the moon, or the progression from child to mother to crone.

Her mother discusses this often. How she has already passed the midway point of this progression, will soon pass into cronehood. She’ll be hunched and feeble then, chewing food with rotting gums, and then her precious daughter will take care of her, of course, won’t you? The same way I fed you by hand, from diapers to business casual slacks. You don’t fill out the slacks quite as well yet, but we’ll work on that.

She presses a hand over her belly: not swollen with child yet, but give it time. Soon enough she, too, will pass that threshold, and then she will be the one passing into cronehood.

This is life, for a woman, she knows. A daily cycle of working and recharging. An hourly cycle of firing off the next email, putting out the next fire. A lifetime of churning along the revolving wheel of giving: her mother gave her everything, so she must pay it back in turn. Her child will become her everything, so she must pay it all it’s due. What, then, will be left for her? What will be left of her?

There is no end to it. She will do the same work every day until she dies, and is reborn, and begins once again. She will keep walking nowhere, keep clipping onto a chain that goes nowhere, and her child will keep growing in her belly until it consumes every morsel she swallows.

This is motherhood.

Her mother likes to remind her of her conception dream: waking up in a bare room, a procession of ants marching away. No thread of story, no clear setting; just the certainty that everyone was leaving. She was just a tiny speck of an idea, then, a beginning with no form or function, and yet she gave the gift of this dream, her mother says. Her mother argues that this signifies passing all of herself on to her unborn child. Others would call it meaningless. A dog dream.

She’s been here for hours or days or minutes of REM sleep, and if there’s any meaning to be found, it lies nowhere near. Just the cold metal of the chain, the burgeoning swell of her belly. Each step just entangles her further in a cage of her own making. This is a dog dream. This is pointless.

She scowls at the links in her hand. Why must this be her dream? Who led her to this soulless, barren place? What cosmic game is she playing here?

Why shouldn’t she write her own dream?

She tears at the golden chain, bending the clips to useless angles. They turn pale as she deforms them, red cracks forming. 

The walls fade from a proud golden hue to a speckled, fleshy tone like aged skin. Like her grandmother’s hands clasped around her own, passing on the weight of generations’ failures and aspirations.

The room is full of bent wires now, branching and breaking off in every direction, useful to no one. She touches one hesitantly, starting to feel remorse, and it hardens on contact. She knows the rules. There’s no taking it back now. No forgiveness for breaking the chain, no reparations for these meaningless tools. No respite for a jaded mother, no recompense for her pains. She belongs to no one. She cannot ever repay her mother, cannot begin to comprehend the hours and opportunities she’s paid forward. She cannot ever satisfy her child, cannot come close to the myriad wonders of the wide world. She would know. She will never be satisfied either. But she will give up her chance for no one.

And yet the child grows in her belly. Inherits her features and her faults. Engulfs her entire frame. Swallows the soft curve of her stomach, the stork-thin sticks of her legs, the chipped paint on each filed fingernail. The blunt force of her curiosity, the sharp edges of her self-criticism. The steady drumbeat of her determination. The singing syllables of her name.

The farthest reaches of her self.

The ground is hard under her crumpled knees. She curls over, curls around the swell of her belly. This is all she is, all she will be. A daughter paying back the debt of lanternless nights and thirteen-hour flights. A mother paying forward a burden of ruined opportunities and misguided dreams.

A girl alone in a room, on her knees, crying out to no one.

🍰

From the moment she rushes through the door, she’s besieged from all sides. She’s behind schedule already - but that can easily be explained away as someone else’s fault. Someone delivered an order late. Someone had a mishap in the kitchen. Someone had a panic attack at the sheer demand for productivity presented by this evening. It happens.

They swarm her as she approaches the table. Beady eyes in every direction, following the plate in her hands with laser focus, ignoring her unsteady footfalls while she keeps the plate aloft. It’s her mother’s very best recipe for a vanilla cake. It’s always had too much cream for her taste, but somehow it always turns out to be a crowd favorite. She keeps her eyes on the plate, on maintaining its smooth trajectory through the air, then glances down. Notes the red-speckled patterns on the floor tiles. Meets the eyes of an onlooker.

She stumbles. The heels are absurdly high and impractically long on her feet. She doesn’t remember if they’re one of the hand-me-downs from her mother, but that doesn’t matter right now. At the first sign of weakness, they’re streaming down from the walls, converging on the floor at her feet. The floor will be completely covered before she reaches the table, and then she’ll have nowhere to go. She thought she was ready for this. She thought she could run this on her own, answering to no one.

She’s painted and pretty for once. The colors on her face crack as she gives a tight smile, tries to politely request that they clear the way. A small space clears, and she takes a step. sets her foot down wrong, twists her ankle out at a horrid angle. Her mother would be horrified. No lady should walk like a gangly, tottering newborn giraffe. She recovers, but it’s too late. There’s a nip at her offending ankle, and then another. She continues forward, wobbling slightly on her heels, ignoring the steady pricking of small teeth, gently pushing through the wall of small, angry bodies.

She’ll redeem herself. She’ll plate up a masterpiece on the table. It’s already mostly covered in plates and pitchers, but she can take it as a balancing exercise. Where an unpracticed eye may set down a supper, she will create a feast for the mouth _and_ the eyes.

Balancing the plate in one hand, she reaches for the nearest bowl. Tiny jaws clamp down on her fingers. With a cry, she snatches it back, but it’s too late. She knows the rules. She tried to take back what had already been set in place. The rat straightens on the table, fixes her with one crimson eye, a drop of her blood falling from its fangs.

In one motion, the other rats on the table rise to their feet.

The blood seeps into the pristine white tablecloth. That’ll stain. She’d spit on it to rub it out, but even this cannot be reversed. She watches dully as it spreads, sinks, oxidizes to brown.

She has ruined everything.

The rats watch her as one. They’ve stopped leaving tiny bites in her ankles. The background chittering has fallen away to silence. She’s made a _scene_ , and they’re all beholden to it, socially obligated to watch it run its course and then spread it in tittering whispers to every available ear, at which point she will truly be ruined. Everyone will know. Everyone will hear that she stumbles when she walks, stutters when she talks, and - the worst offense of all - makes excuses when she stumbles. No one likes a sniveller.

She meets the eyes of rats all across the room. Shifts on her feet unsteadily. She can feel the plate rising to a dangerous angle, and then the cake gradually slipping down.

The cream is cold when it falls into her face.

The chilling sensation shocks her into action: she won’t stand for this. What right do they have, to her hard work? To her embarrassment, her reputation? She starts snatching up handfuls of cake and flinging them at the rats. _Splat_. You are small, insignificant. _Splat_. You are vile, insatiable. _Splat_. You would watch me trip and break my ankle before you ever reached out to me, and even then, you would only steal the plate from my hands and take it all to yourself. You call yourself discerning, controlled, selective - and I counter with backwards, reductive, close-minded. You call yourself a woman of worldly virtue, but you’re just a miserable miserly old hag who turns up her nose at helpless children on the street. You call yourself a wise mentor imparting lessons of resilience and thick skin, but you’re just a belligerent bully who will always promise the gentling touch of a hand and always deliver the unforgiving lash of the switch.

The rats swarm on the splattered handfuls of cake, but it’s not enough. They turn to her, one by one, and rush at her from all sides. Clamber up her dress on sharpened claws. Yank on her hair to reach her head, and then they’re in her face, a thousand tiny jaws gulping down the cake. She’s on the floor in a mess of writhing rats.

She almost feels herself sinking into the floor under the weight. Eyes squeezed closed, she wills herself to wake up, to send herself anywhere but here. To sink into further depths, or further levels of slumber

🚪

The skies are blue. A dreamy sort of blue, like an early morning, or a bath bomb revolving down the drain. She can imagine it just so: the pale bubbles disappearing one after the other, as tendrils of deeper blue water cut through and curve into the descent. The foam slipping through her spread fingers.

Her eyes are open. She doesn’t remember opening them. But she can control them: close, open. Close, open. She has toes, too. These, she wiggles. That leads to feet, tapping out a rhythm in midair; legs, kicking out awkwardly to confirm that she can. Her entire body operating in tandem, now that she remembers it. But still, her eyes first, measuring the skies above and relabeling them as a finite ceiling.

She comes to in a blue room. She’s laying on a cloud, but it’s not nearly as soft as everyone rhapsodizes it to be. She sits up, and it chafes at her arms like unspun cotton.

She lifts her head to find more clouds, draped over the rest of the room in whimsical piles. A battered door leaning away on a far cloud, attached to nothing – a nowhere door. By her feet, a box of matches as long as she is tall.

The room is cold, desolate, damp. The cloud has started soaking through the seat of her dress. A shiver racks through her.

She knows what she must do.

She pulls out a match, large and unwieldy in her hands. She strikes against the matchbox. It fails to light, but does not break. Even so, she tosses it aside. Pulls out the next. Fails to light it. Tosses it aside. Pulls out the next. She lets it rest between her knees for a moment, considering. The wood is even rougher on her hands than the clouds. Even as she works, she knows no match will light until the powers that be deign to release her into the next room. And then it will all start over again. She will try every match, read every book, link every clip. And for what?

She pulls out the entire drawer of the box and dumps all of the matches in a sprawl on the ground. She knows the rules, but she doesn’t care. None of this matters now.

She reaches into the cloud with both hands and clutches at the swells of vapor, wrenches them towards her chest in a fluid motion. Subsides into the cold darkness with a sigh.

Closes her eyes and hangs suspended between raindrops.

🐛

Her feet are cold.

She groans and tries to pull them in, back under the covers. This always happens when she’s stressed and can’t fall asleep at night. She kicks around, splays her limbs out on the sheets, and ends up with a hand out in the open, a foot hanging out over the edge. Hopefully sleep will return easily once she’s warm and snug again. She draws her knees in towards her chest.

Her heels meet resistance, like a loose thread caught on a sharp edge. It tugs at her ankles. More threads draw taut across her knees when she bends them. With a dawning awareness, she wakes up to a dense closeness, warm and itchy all across her body.

There are white threads all around, cocooning her, and she can’t see.

Through a few minutes’ struggle, she tears out a little hole and peers out. It’s a simple room in flat surfaces of blue-green. Branches protrude from the walls overhead, improbably smooth and clay-like. The floor is littered with fallen leaves, all the same tones of blue-green as the floor, the walls, the branches. As she watches, a gray-green _thing_ approaches on many stubby pairs of legs. It trundles up to a leaf and starts tearing it up in efficient, half-moon bites.

A silkworm, her mind supplies. And a mulberry leaf.

Once it finishes off the leaf, it trundles up to her and breathes out raw silk, walls her back in. She considers struggling, but there’s no going back.

Her eyes close reflexively when the silk lays over them. She evens out her breath, taking measured inhales through her nose. Perhaps this is all she ever wanted: the chance to slow down, even to a stop. To rest her eyes for just a moment. She’s warm and snug again now; sleep will come.

She rests her mind, and forgets. In the cocoon, she goes through metamorphosis. Shrinks. Recedes into herself, into a self she’d forgotten.

🈜

She’s laying on the grass, magnifying glass in hand. The buzz of cicadas has faded to white noise in her ears. She found a grasshopper over there, but that’s old news now. At intervals across the grass, small green lights come on, meander a few inches, wink out.

There are walls, but she doesn’t know this, is no longer old enough to recognize the challenge. In this moment, nothing exists but the grass at her feet, the lights winking before her, the grasshopper jumping away into the darkness. The world could be infinite, the grass stretching out in an endless plane, or the world could be small and close, the walls squeezing in claustrophobically close on all sides. It doesn’t matter.

A light winks on a few paces in front of her. She giggles, wiggles forward on her belly. The firefly is tiny and perfect under her discerning eye: six jointed legs, two pairs of unsheathed wings, one gently glowing butt. If she’d brought a jar, she could have kept it with her forever. If she goes back for a jar now, she might wake up her parents, and then they’ll flip on all the lights in the house, complain in loud, insistent voices, and the fireflies will become practically invisible in the streaming light from the windows. They’ll still be there, of course. They’re always there, lit up or not.

The firefly disappears. She makes a startled sound.

It reappears a few paces on. She crawls after it happily.

Her dress is green, a bit paler than the grass, but comparable to the grasshopper. That’ll be fixed easily, though, with the grass stains she’ll get rolling around. Then her camouflage will be perfect, and she’ll be able to hide out here for hours without her parents noticing.

She’ll be like a firefly. Her mother will come out onto the back step, calling wayward little girls home to dinner, but her firefly daughter will turn on her back, grass-green belly to the sky. She’ll become one with the grass, and her mother will shake her head in confusion, turn back to doling out the bowls of rice. And then she’ll roll onto her belly once again, and the bright green of her dress will announce her to the world. I am here, even when you can’t see me. I live on, even when you think I’m gone. I walk uncharted ways, and I stop for no one.

She continues forward through the grass, an assiduous caterpillar wriggling along.

Presently, the lights converge on a hole in the ground.

She falls gleefully.

🈥

Her fall is broken by many unconnected cords, coming together as an uneven net. They sag under her weight, then deposit her roughly on the ground. She finds herself seated on sunny yellow earth, oddly papery to the touch. Looking up, she finds a chaotic network of laundry lines, airing out clothes in spotless white with sporadic yellow and blue. She delights in the bright, clean colors.

She begins walking, brushing past the dangling articles of clothing, cool on her skin.

The ground beneath her feet becomes uneven, broken into irregular planes. The vague polygons gradually stand out in sharper relief, until they reveal themselves as cheerful yellow ginkgo leaves flattened underfoot, recognizable by the distinctive fan shape. Eventually, she reaches a knee-high pile, standing on its own a few paces away from an entire shoreline of loose leaves rising and falling like ocean waves. She reaches in with both hands and rummages around. Grabbing onto something cold and metallic, she carefully pulls out a European flute, disrupting the pile minimally.

She sits by the pile and plays a song. A slow song, steady like each footfall against the welcoming earth. Lilting and carefree like a ginkgo leaf dancing to the ground. She’s facing the laundry lines, so she watches them ripple in the wind.

There’s a sound behind her, a rustling that starts like a few leaves trickling and then grows to a waterfall roar. She keeps her eyes ahead and finishes the song.

She sets the flute down gently on top of the pile.

Turning back, she finds a pure white paper boat resting atop the leaves. The peak in the center just about reaches her height when she’s sitting. She climbs in, careful of its balance.

She sets off into the yellow sea.  
  
  
  
She sails for some time before she spots them.

Waves of paper fans start to rise, crest, fall through the yellow leaves. They flutter as they break, releasing bursts of wind that scatter the leaves and blow her hair back from her face. She watches waves of green phasing into blue, phasing into indigo, phasing into violet, cycling back around to green. A wave or two of red fans surge on the backs of violet ones. The winds push her boat back and forth, and she clings to the papery peak with both arms. She has come this far. Rules aside, she would never turn back now. The only way is forward, even when you walk uncharted ways.

There are no leaves left now. She peers around, and all she sees is the rise and fall of a thousand fans, passing her along through the sea like so many rolling hands. It would be like crowd-surfing, she thinks whimsically, if it weren’t for the gale-force winds and constant sound of crinkling paper.

She sails to a corner of the room, tastefully decorated with sea green wallpaper. The wave of fans crashes into the unyielding walls and splashes back in an upsurge twice her height. She has a moment to panic before her boat tips over in the oncoming tide, sending her tumbling backward. Impact; she hangs suspended just below the surface for a moment. All around her, a contingent of blue fans converges upon her position and twirls into a vortex.

She flails her arms and kicks out wildly. While she has not yet fallen, she can still rise again. The fans scrape against her skin but leave no cuts.

As much as she struggles, she sinks. With every inch she gives, the fans start to close around her neck, her mouth, her eyes. Just as she’s about to be completely submerged, she sees a rope hanging just out of reach, directly above her hand.

A lifeline. A way out. A deus ex machina, not so outlandish in this unfathomable house.

She closes her hand. Stills her legs. Falls beneath the whirling fans.

Whatever path she treads, it will be her own.

🉃

She drifts. For some time, there is no sense of motion, no arrival anywhere; an untethered feeling. Fluid against her skin, but no current, no riptide. She’s laying still; she’s spinning in lazy circles; she’s traveling with the unhurried flow.

Her senses condense down to her most basic existence. She is afloat. The fluid is warm. No walls, no doors. No eyes, no hands. No voice.

Water all around. An absence of sound. A void of scent or taste. A watery void. A touch of awareness within the water.

A touch of will bearing her through the unknowing darkness.

Something in the water greets her with a subtle warmth. Recognizes her, acknowledges her, and enfolds her in something smooth, like waxy leaves, but soft. A sensation like hands folding to cup her between weathered palms.

A voice piping up, not in her ears, or into her mind, but from somewhere within.

I impart upon you the lessons of your foremothers. You are your own person. You belong to us. You have the freedom of choice. You have the burden of expectation. You are a child, to be guided with a firm hand. You are an adult, empowered to make your own mistakes. You are mother, daughter, and self. You are you. You walk alone. You carry us with you.

You are safe and contained. You are free and unrestrained. You are protected. You are set free.

Sleep now.

She is warm, surrounded. Sleep comes easily.

She rests, curling into herself, hugging her knees to her chest. In the close darkness, a dream.

In her dream, she rises, like a tree reaching toward the light.

Unknowing, she breaks the surface of the water and floats gently.

🈟

The walls open around her.

A rush of fresh air against her skin.

She becomes aware of herself again. Eyes closed. Heart beating. Legs crossed at the ankles. Arms clasped about her knees. The warm air weighs down on her eyelids. Smooth petals sag beneath her seated form. Her hair cascades smoothly down her back in a tidy ponytail.

She’s seated in the center of a lotus, in a pond swimming in soft pink blossoms. Their leaves reach out from the water at all angles; the lowest of these form a makeshift walkway above the water. A low green haze settles over the scene. She sits for a moment and drinks in the sight.

The hazy warmth of a humid room, like a greenhouse.

The quiet sound of the water lapping at her leaves.

She tugs out the hair-tie, restores it at a higher, tighter spot.

She stands. Tests out a leaf with one foot. Perches on it, startled at how light she is on her feet. She leaps, soars in midair, comes to rest on another blossom. Laughs delightedly, jumps from plant to plant. Lands on the very tip of a lotus bud, minutely smooth under her toes instead of sharp.

She weighs each step before she takes it. Lands each jump once she’s started it. Plans from flat leaf to tilting pad to sturdy blossom. Tilts her head, notices a bud off to the side, easily blocked by its neighbors; lays out her path once again to include it. She never looks back. Lands on a single toe, balanced atop a bud tip, as much as possible, the very image of poise. Lets her arms curve down artistically when she touches down.

She starts to make her way through once again.

The rules are simple; the game exhilarating. Make your own path. Never turn back. Pass each room as a separate stage, an adventure all its own from those before it. Do not let them wound you. The dream may spill your blood, but you wake up again, get up again, and dream.

The river flows, and neither the smashing rocks nor the gentle eddies can hold you forever. You, too, flow. You leap over sudden cliffs and catch yourself running on the other side. You crash into slowing deltas and throw yourself to every ocean that’ll have you. You have a spring within you, small, unassuming, but constant, brimming with anticipation. You flow.

She, too, flows on.

She sets her path and forges it proudly, for she walks uncharted ways, and she belongs to no one.

**Author's Note:**

> \- originally written as my stream of consciousness in all lowercase, mostly in the order presented  
> \- influenced by the folklore I’ve been reading and my vague thoughts about how some of them deal with gender, and also by Alice in Wonderland, the Chinese movie Re-Cycle, and the horror story NoEnd House  
> \- also I went overboard on the prompt... the link at the top includes more artworks than the original prompt. I needed to fill in parts of the storyline, but I ran out of suitable art from the original post  
> \- when I think about it, probably part of the reason writing this went so fast was that there’s no dialogue


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